Framework for Comprehensive Assessment of a City's Natural Disaster Risk

Most traditional regional natural disaster risk assessments use either engineering-based loss estimation modeling that focuses on probabilistic assessment of damage to the physical infrastructure, or a social science–based index approach that focuses on assessing vulnerability or resilience of the people exposed. Both have important strengths, but to date, the two have remained largely separate. In this paper, we introduce a new framework for comprehensive assessment of a city's natural disaster risk that aims to integrate the strengths of the two approaches into a single method that can be used to assess a city's risk. The framework essentially extends the probabilistic engineering loss estimation framework to include social resilience in a way that treats social resilience and physical infrastructure damage equally with a parallel structure. We illustrate application of the framework through a case study application to the seismically active city of Padang, Indonesia.